I began to trust my dimly-lit memories and those intensely violent nightmares, in which my wings were severed by Peldastiquon wielding ophidia.  From them it seemed safe to derive an assumption that modern day equivalents of the wing-taker sects had entered an alliance with Badezon scientists, who were themselves tasked and paid by a government that appeared to have forgotten its sworn obligation to protect its citizens from that ancient terrorism, among many other kinds.  Further, under the terms of such a malevolent alliance, my wings had been taken from me, and in their place I had received plasticizing surgery so that I could pass as human.

Facts kept falling into place.  Of course – now I understood the reason that the faces of the Badezon who took my wings showed no emotion.  The wing-takers were wearing the ophidian face masks that mythology suggested they should wear.  As for the scientists, men and women whose experimental routine dictates that they remain expressionless – poker-faced, humans would say – you could expect nothing better.

But when during the middle part of the day, I shook off the memories and nightmares, and felt myself warmed by Chan’s embrace, I was to all intents and purposes a happy human, living among humans.  The deficiency of having been rendered wingless was cancelled out here; it had no meaning.  My heart leapt at this thought, until others struck me in long and horrifying chains.  Was Chan an agent of the wing-takers, the scientists, the government?  Sandy too?  Was I in fact still on Badezon, imprisoned in some little-known and unrecognisable corner of it, where an innocent might be experimented or practiced upon?  An entertainment even, a day to day drama watched by millions Badezon over, discussed between colleagues, friends, and family as if it were indeed a fiction, and not a cage of misery into which one poor drugged and butchered unfortunate had been less than gently placed by manipulating claws?

I began to wonder whether anything I touched was real.  I imagined that this was all just a stage set, whose limits I would uncover if only I went far enough in any one direction.  Chan had entrapped me with her sweetness, her clever artist-cum-loner disguise, her entirely credible simulation of need, hunger, desire.  Seeds of hate were sown among the flowers of love.

One night I fastened upon the notion. Chan was no human, no artist, but a Badezon scientist.  A doctor or psychologist, perfectly positioned to control the subject of the experiment or the nature of the entertainment; on hand to ensure that I played by the experiment’s rules and inflicted no harm upon myself.  Witness the austerity of her gaze so habitually adopted in our first weeks.  Think of how well she calmed me when I woke from my nightmares.  Think of how she always tried to turn my thoughts to love, to loving.  Watched by millions!  Lying awake in bed in the wind-buffeted depths of the night, I became hot with shame and anger.  With an effort I forced myself not to move, struggling to contain the rage which would have me scream murderously at my captor.

But how could they be sure that I would not harm Chan?  They must be watching my every move.  This was not highlights, it was round the clock, from one day’s suns’ rising to the next.  Every Badezon knew that espionage was the government’s forte.  They would have military police – or even Gedavippio – on permanent stand-by in one of the other nearby coastal cottages in this artificial row, with a control centre somewhere close at hand – no doubt in the faceless concrete structure next to Sandy’s bar.

I must not give myself away in temper, if I wanted to escape.  Yet what was to stop me surprising them now, here in the middle of the night?  They would not expect it.  In which house were the guard stationed?  It must be one of the two either side, so that they stood a chance of reaching me in time were I to attempt to kill their scientist.  Unless, of course, they had a beam permanently trained upon me from within this house itself!  One false move and I might surrender my starring role to an equally unfortunate newcomer.

Again I urged myself not to panic, not to throw on the lights and put them on alert.  I must slip from the bed as if going to the toilet.  Then to the kitchen as if for a glass of water.  Then outside, as if to scan the sky as I had done so many harmless times before, looking earnestly for the return of my traitorous people come finally to fetch me home.

I needed a weapon.  I needed my own blade.  I did not think that any of Chan’s modelling tools in the lean-to by the back door would serve my purpose, so once in the kitchen I would silently take the bread knife from its stand.  It would hardly be a match for an ophidia or cintilar, but concealed in the arm of my jumper, I might surprise at least one of my enemies with it before they took me down.

The legends of the wing-taker sects remain as stories to scare the young and the nervy.  Legend relates that it was Peldastiquo himself who took the last pair of wings from the last bird, and that he arranged that henceforth members of the sect should wear a mask imprinted with the facial image of that extinguished ancient species.  And though it is not known whether Peldastiquo himself used it – despite the attempts of artists of later centuries to show him in the throes of smiting the last bird with it – the blade of the Peldastiquon was named after this species against whom we had used the weapon over long centuries – the ophidia.  The sword which bore the ophidian name had long since passed into disuse, revived only by myth and dramatisation, but in its time it was said to be sharp enough to cut the substantial flesh of even the toughest of those wild reptilian birds, and light enough to wield at speed and with great control.  The metal was the colour of mercury, the weight was akin to steel’s and in its diamond hardness it resembled titanium.  A lattice work handle allowed the Peldastiquon to achieve the best claw purchase on the weapon; the blade was shaped like a snake in flight, its sinuous edge a lacerating wave.  Catch flesh with the leading part of the ophidia’s wave, and it was cut away; catch a limb with the depth of the curve and it was as if the blade doubled, clossing around gristle and bone with a scissoring motion.

With symbolic intent, a later largely ceremonial sword modelled on this early bird-killer was named after our sworn inter-planetary enemies the Cintilars.

The Peldastiquon killed off bird species successively and mercilessly, deaf to naturalist protests.  They had taken their wings as trophies, but the wing-taking lust still raged.  Unchecked by legislature or populace – both of whom feared to oppose them – the Peldastiquon finally brought about a birdless world.  After that there was only one species left whose wings they could take.  Their own.  Not that they had waited until the ceremonial slaughter of the last bird had taken place.  They developed their taste for Badezon wing-taking long before the last mournful swoop of an escaping bird against the sky was witnessed.

Legend also says that on the day of judgement it will be the resurrected Peldastiquo who will with a giant ophidia scythe the mountains of Badezon in two, opening up the furnaces below for the molten liquid of destruction to pour forth and burn up the forests, boil away the lakes.  On that day those Badezon who can still fly will hover above the raging fire and bubbling lava until exhaustion takes hold, and one by one the last of our species will drop to their deaths.  (Legend has of course been surpassed by the subsequent technological developments that made leaving our planet possible, but the mythic horror remains, for what good would the life of Badezon explorer be without a home planet to which one day he or she can return?)

Grounded on Earth, increasingly I suspected that the Peldastiquon ophidia was the blade that had taken my wings.  In my darkest moments Chan could not reach me and in my wingless state I believed it was worse to live on so than to die.  The wingless were in all respects deficient.  They were deprived of the practical means upon which living in the Badezon world depended; and, believe me, the symbolic weight of their loss was greater still.

If I was not of this planet, if I was originally from one called Badezon, had I paid the ultimate price in service of my species on this research mission to Earth?  Had my wings been amputated so that I might pass as human?  And was the process reversible?  I looked in Chan’s hallway mirror at where the stumps should be, at where the welts were, red scorches in white human skin.  I could imagine no operation that would be successful in reattaching wings to these alien shoulders.  There were recent instances of reattachment, but they stemmed from accidental severance and close proximity to the best surgeons with the wing accompanying the victim into the operating theatre.  Where were my wings?  The best I could hope for was that they had been placed in frozen storage.  But I had lost not only my feathers but the bony structures at the shoulder blades to which Badezon wings were fixed.  I could not see a future in which I was able to fly again.  The boy who had been fascinated by the stories of the ancient wing-taking sects of Badezon had somehow become their modern-day victim.

Of the many rival sects that the mythological history of Badezon records, two became dominant, and their names have been whispered down the ages, ensuring the survival of their enigma if not their actual continuity.

There were the Peldastiquon, an order at the level of the ancient aristocracy of Badezon.  What had begun as sport turned into darker pursuits over the centuries as they used hunting skills on their political enemies.  It was enough to take the trophy of their wings, and then the token of their tongues, for who could continue to hold the ear of a king or a queen without a tongue?

As is so often the case with sects, the Gedavippio began as a faction of the Peldastiquon.  Legend says that there was a move by the Peldastiquon leadership to curtail the extent of the sect’s barbarous practices, with a stipulation that the wings of fellow Badezon should not be clipped without the exhaustion of all other options and a unanimous vote by all attending its necessarily secretive ruling council.  With sufficient sleight of hand the ruling council used both political and a final few nostalgic wing-taking measures to rid itself of opposition, and push through the sect’s transition into an expanded honorary organisation, the guiding purpose of which was to look after its members career and business interests.

But they failed to tear the wings or tongue from Gedavippi himself.  Always a killer and never a council member, none dared go after him.  He drew many younger members, their blood-lust still keen, away from the portly embrace of the Peldastiquon, and satisfied that keenness in allowing his new followers to ground the leaders of the old order one by one.  The Peldastiquon was forced to recreate an armed wing to defend itself against the Gedavippio until finally, after many wing-takings, a kind of balance – in the form of an unspoken truce – was reached.  Through the centuries the fortunes of each rose and fell, coincided and were once again sundered.  In modern times the Peldastiquon have become extremely secretive.  No member would publicly admit to membership; but it is well-known that certain government and military roles are in their gift.

As for the Gedavippio, few now believe they remain at large, although occasionally reports surface of ritualistic murders with wing-taking hallmarks, creating a flurry of rumour which dies away soon enough.  But though the Gedavippio went deep into the forests of Badezon long ago, no-one knows for sure whether the sect has managed to hand down its tenets with unbroken continuity, or whether the wing-takings that sporadically darken the light of our suns are the work of individuals or groups invoking their name for purposes which always and inevitably remain obscure.

For weeks we lived day to day, moment to moment, in a state of bliss.  With the attraction acknowledged, and alien-human relations consummated, the remaining barriers were down.  I was less extraterrestrial and more Chan’s lover.  She was less species to be researched and more my reason to exist.  I began to talk, and talk, and with each word came more recollection of the planet I had left.  Whether I had left by choice or involuntarily I still did not know, but my memories took wing as I told Chan of the endless forests and sudden mountainous verticals out of which we had hewn our dwellings, once life among the trees began to be thought of as overly primitive.  I told her of being young and flying alone for the first time through these ancient forests that were once our habitat and now were our playground.  The trees there that grew on a scale whose greatness was in equivalent ratio to us as the average tree to bird size here on earth.  I told her in a voice of sorrow and shame that there were no other winged species – archaeological records showed that there had been once, and among evolutionary biologists arguments still raged as to whether we or some other natural force had killed off these potential rivals.  Secretly we all knew in our hearts what the answer was; the wars we had fought with our interplanetary neighbours told us all we needed to know about our natural bellicosity.

I told Chan of flying through the tops of those trees and meandering beneath them; of tight spots with beasts of prey whose earthbound heaviness we would dare ourselves against, risking our limbs were we to find ourselves trapped from skywards escape by a web of criss-crossing low-hanging branches.  I told her of the tribes that still lived in the trees, preferring the freedom and the light, suspicious of us cave dwellers and how far we had dug ourselves into the mountainous massed of rock that was the contrasting inorganic substance of our planet.  The young were excepted in this regard, for curiosity on both tree- and cave-dwelling sides had not yet been quite extinguished.  Unlikely friendships blossomed across this divide like a vast forest of flower-vines, and secret courtships were warily undertaken despite that each such instance of love was doomed and in all senses finite.  How blessed was I now to feel that this new love of mine and Chan’s had no restrictions, was seemingly without end; but I did not speak my happiness out loud for fear of ill-fortune or hearing from Chan in reply a note of contradiction, however small.

I told her of flying above the crystal plains of the mountainous regions, eyes part-shielded from the glare produced by the sun reflecting off the quartz slopes, their semi-translucence smoothed into waving rolls by prehistoric geological forces of unimaginable magnitude; of how our wings caught flashes of purple and green as we swooped low across them.  When she asked me who I had flown with, I made light of the fact that I could not remember, returning to the question only when the spirit of Eden we had found became the everyday state in which we lived and I began again to wonder about the purpose that had brought me to earth.  What was it?  Surely I had not been sent to Earth just to please one of its inhabitants.

Finally I told her of the cathedrals of light we had built by tunnelling into the dominions of quartz and in so doing creating vast rooms separated from the sky, the sun and the moons only by a thin thickness of translucent roof.  These rooms, their expanses bathed in light tinged with grey, green or violet were where those of us with an inclination to do so worshipped, or governed, or performed, or lived, if you were rich or powerful or both.  I could not recall that I was well-off or that I possessed any kind of authority; increasingly I began to feel that I was here on earth because I was expendable.

It was when I could not imagine life without Chan that the nightmares began, waking me each night with what became habitual and disorienting terror.  In the quiet before dawn, once she had soothed me, I told her what had caused me to wake clutching at my shoulders and screaming in pain.

‘I dreamt of the severance of my wings.  There was a blade – a sharp one – wielded by the claws of my own kind – strong they would have to be to cleave through the muscle and tendon which connects wing to body.  Their faces betrayed no emotion, no concern or malice – just a strength whose violence was concentrated on one end – the ultimate crime for and against us, short of taking a life.  To take the wings of a fellow Badezon – that’s not how we are at all, not now…’  I shuddered, and made as if to shelter myself beneath the wings that I no longer had.

I woke suddenly, started out of bed, and bumped my head against the angled ceiling.  Listening intently to the sound which had woken me, I ignored the pain.  A noise at a lower frequency than a human aircraft, but louder by far, and bigger.  I scrambled out of the sleeping bag, and made for the door, dimly aware that my activity was likely to disturb Chan.

‘What’s wrong?’  I registered that anxious look on her face, as if I was about to disappear as suddenly as I had arrived, but I did not stop to allay her fears.  Downstairs I tripped on the step up into the kitchen, recovered, and raced for the side door.  I was still fiddling with the lock and key when Chan reached round me for the handle and pushed the door ajar for me to exit.  I vaulted the low wall which divides the back yard from the front of the house and staggered onto the decking, scanning the sky and bumping into a chair.  There was cloud cover and above it and through the whistling melody of the wind and the rhythm of the waves, the last of the noise was fading away.  Of light or shadow there was no hint.  I dropped to my knees and contorted my neck – my unusually long neck, Chan had pointed out – to press the bump on my head against the damp wood.

I felt Chan’s arm around my back and shrugged it off, irritated not for the first time that she had turned into my shadow.  She pushed me over and hurried back into the house.  I lay on my back looking up at the night, watching for breaks in the cloud, not seeing what I wanted to see but instead only the glinting of far-off stars.  Alien galaxies both to human and Badezon.

She was waiting at the kitchen table when I came back in.

‘Did you hear it?’

‘The plane?  Yes.’

‘That wasn’t a plane.  No plane of yours that I’ve heard makes a sound like that.’

‘It was a big plane – a jumbo, I guess, or a large military job.  We don’t get a lot of them down here, you know.  I admit it sounded a lot lower than they usually fly, but…’

I sat down at the table and took her hand in mine.

‘You don’t believe me.’

Chan sighed.  I took from it that she had not yet made up her mind one way or the other.

‘When I was a kid I used to live near an army town.  During the day you’d hear the soldiers practising on their rifle range three or four miles away with what sounded like a variety of weaponry, and I’d wonder if the constant gentle popping of the guns was so very different from hearing the same sounds at the same distance in a real war zone, a real war-torn city.  But there is no comparison; we’ve never lived with the sense that our lives might be torn apart at any moment, and I’m glad now that my teenage self didn’t overly romanticise those guns – guns we never saw and took for granted – and find myself wishing for the adventure of war, civil or otherwise.  To exist with that raw and constant psychological edge in one’s life, and then for the edge to reach out and cut you with one or more of a million possible indignities, that is a nightmare we have thankfully been spared.’  She stopped and laughed.  ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’

I didn’t know why she was telling me it either.  My logic was faultless, for all that I was nominally the mad one.  Logic was not Chan’s strong suit.  I knew what I had heard.  It connected with me in some primal way, at the same intense pitch as when scenes from my Badezon past flashed before my eyes.  I had come to realise that often Chan spoke to establish for herself what she thought about a subject.  Otherwise her mental processes were too butterfly-complex and ambivalent to land on the resting place of a leaf.  She kept on fluttering, making patterns in the minds of those who watched her until she was out of sight.  And who knew then where or what she was.  I had seen the men in Sandy’s bar watching her, even Sandy himself.  Their eyes paid tribute to her.  But – and it had nothing to do with me being with her – they were also frightened of Chan.  Her piercing artist’s eye, her living alone.  They believed that even if she didn’t see through them right away, she would soon find them out.  So they did what Sandy did, and declared her off-limits.   All this I had learnt in the space of an evening, watching her like all the other men from the bar while I talked to Sandy.  Except I was not like other men.  I was not a man.  And Chan could no longer be said to live alone.

She rose from the table keeping a hold of my hand.  So I rose too, and together – slowly, not letting go of each other – we climbed the stairs.

The newness of this new experience was like no other before or since.  In the dark of her bedroom she led me, and I followed, awkwardly at first, then with some degree of intuition, half-Badezon, half-human.  But when it came the moment was unexpected, as though I had without warning been shot through a wormhole of light all the way home.